Got your top-spec developer's machine with Visual Studio installed, an instance of SQL Server with databases and Sitecore running on your IIS? So far, so good. You may now start working with platform. However, for real productivity you may need certain extras we'll now go through.

1. Sitecore RocksToday Rocks became a mature plugin allowing unbelievably wide range of Sitecore tasks and activities right from your Visual Studio. It grew from an idea of being able to manipulate Sitecore tree right from Solution Explorer (without permanent switches to browser and back), but with time acquired a mass of killing features, covering all aspects of working with Sitecore. Let's just name few of them:

2. Team Development for Sitecore - TDSAnother Visual Studio extension worth of several separate articles. It is manly focused on resolving troubles of having sitecore itens and sitecore code seperately, so it solves the issue by serializing items and keeping them in source control along with the code so that multiple people working at the same solution can have solid commits and fair versioning policy.

TDS can help you with many other handy tasks like item merging, code generation, packaging and auto deployment, config transformation and others. If you follow the link below - you'll get ver y self-descriptive home page explaining what exactly and how TDS does.

3. ReflectorNot Sitecore specific, but .NET-wide, Reflector is a tool that decompiles and reveals the code hidden in DLL libraries (if not obfuscated) and allows browse it and drill into system DLLs as well. We use it widely with Sitecore as Sitecore is not allways specific about ints internal architecture in official documentation, but knowing internals is the must for any good developer. A good example can be pipelines architecture - it is not quite documented (if at all) while from time to time one would need to override default behavior or add additional processors. Without knowing what exactly original code does that becomes not possible.

4. dotPeekOne more .NET decompiler (which is free, unlike previously mentioned Reflector) have recently joined the market. Apart from doing decompiling job, it has several useful features, like ability to generate PDB files out of DLL, that makes possible debugging of external DLLs in Visual Studio.

Exporting decompiled code to Visual Studio projects

Support downloading code from source servers or PDB files generation

Quick jump to a type, assembly, symbol or type member

Effortless navigation to symbol declarations, implementations, derived and base symbols, and more

5. Sitecore Instance Manager - SIM
I have a separate article about SIM, so please read that if you are not yet familiar with this brilliant tool. If briefly, SIM simplifies and automates a process of installing an instance of Sitecore (any version you may have in your local repo) to just few clicks, automatically sets up database and configs, installs additional packages and modules on top of instance and keeps multiple useful housekeeping links (to hosts, configs, iis, database etc.) in one place.

6. LukeLuke.NET is a tool to browse Lucene indexes, see the documents, fields and terms, try writing queries against index and see index physical structure. This functionality is partly covered with Rocks, as described above.

7. RoboMongoFor everyone who is after Sitecore 7.5 (and later) and is working with xDB, Robomongo may seem quite handy. What is does is allows to see what you have in your Mongo instance. RoboMongo embeds the same JavaScript engine that powers MongoDB's mongo shell. It means that you can reuse your existing skills of MongoDB shell in RoboMongo. It provides you with syntax highlighting, auto-completion, different view modes (text, tree, custom), and more.There will be a separate article about it coming shortly.